Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in SpainRamón Masats

Kowasa Gallery dedicates an exhibition to Ramón Masats with a catalogue of more than seventy vintage prints, the majority of which are little known and have never before been published. Special emphasis has been placed upon the years 1953-1957, when the young amateur from Terrasa was making his own way through the world of photography in search of a personal language. Like the rest of the photographers of his generation, Masats is conditioned by his time. In this sense, his iconographic resources are delimitated by a traditional register, in which old men, children and farmers abound.

According to Natasha Christia, "the gallery's aim is twofold: firstly to underline the uniqueness of Ramón Masats, and on the other hand to stimulate a revisionist reflexion that challenges the existing need to inscribe and to pigeonhole his photographic practice in the international aesthetic movements of the era (the New Subjectivity of Otto Steinert, the documentary vision spread by "The Family of Man" show at the MoMA in 1955, and the different manifestations of the Humanist Realism in France and in Italy). It is clear that since his very first incursions into photography, the practice of Masats disobeys any concrete style. Sober but at the same time ironic, dry and realistic, yet imaginative and sarcastic, his vision is fully personal, impregnated by nature with an extraordinary intuitive instinct for detecting the "humanity of the moment". From the out-dated scenes and characters of Las Ramblas to the touristic miracle of "Typical Spanish Luncheons", Ramón Masats was able to conceive what was going on below the surface in a deaf-mute era burdened by the legacy of conservatism."